The growth of Micrsoft's Bing search engine has been something of a surprise to the industry, but the parent company feels Bing still has a long road ahead.
That's according to Yusef Mehdi, the man responsible for growing Microsoft's search market share. "We have a very long way to go in search, [where we're] outgunned by Google's scale advantage," said Mehdi, SVP for Microsoft's online audience business, according to an InternetNews.com report.
Bing's share of the U.S. search market has grown every month for the past six months and the number of "heavy users" who return again and again is growing as well, according to Mehdi.
Even with its encouraging growth, Bing is still adding to its arsenal. The engine unveiled a new map service on Wednesday that blends search, map, and photo technology, according to The New York Times. Meanwhile, Microsoft is eagerly awaiting approval on a deal with Yahoo that will make Bing the default search function on all Yahoo pages. Microsoft executives expect the deal to gain approval by early 2010, followed by a year-long process of moving to one ad system.
The combined traffic would give Bing just under a 30 percent share of the search market, still far shy of Google, which often commands more than 60 percent of searches.
